The invention relates to a procedure for information transmission in aligning equipment for motor vehicles, and aligning equipment for carrying out the procedure.
The prior art embraces procedures and equipment for measuring the angles that motor vehicle wheels assume with respect to the geometrical axis of the vehicles, and/or with the drive axis and the ground, which are commonly referred to as toe-in, wheel pitch angle, the angle of incidence of the wheel upright and the stub axle tilt angle.
Further, indications are sent to an operator to correct any erroneous adjustments and to return the angles to their optimal value.
Toe-in and pitch transducers are used to effect the above-mentioned measurements, associated to applied measurement devices applied to the rims of the vehicle wheels.
Such measuring devices are provided with an internal processing unit which communicates with a central processing unit controlled by a special program and which is aimed at processing the information received in order to provided useful information to the operator, by means of a screen, as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,594,789.
The exchange of information between the central processing unit and the peripheral units associated to the single measurement devices is rather complex, however, both because of the need for multi-core connection cables which can easily get tangled up, and because the actual transmission of the information is in itself complex.
Indeed, three lines are necessary to set up bidirectional communication between the central and the peripheral units, one further line for transmission from the peripherals to the central unit, and yet another for transmission control and selection of the unit concerned in the transmission.
The principal aim of the present invention is to obviate the above-mentioned drawbacks by providing a procedure and equipment for simplifying the above operations, by the use of only one serial line for bidirectional communication between a central processing unit and peripheral processing units.
A further aim is to avoid the use of multipolar cables in the said transmission.